The Twin Sisters – a poem

Ancient, serpentine twin gods.
Across the expanse,
Their tendrils plague the length and breadth of humanity.

One chokes.
She wraps her black, oily tentacles, round and round
the gullet of man and woman alike.
No human creature is beyond her sickening touch.
Crushing the larynx, suffocating, heart racing, blood screaming for relief.
She is relentless in her hold, yet torturous in her hesitancy.
A python’s embrace, perpetual, yet demure, a virgin coquette.
She holds, throbbing her rippling sinews, ‘til death is begged.

The other pulverizes.
Like coarse herbs in mortar and pestle.
She encircles, inch by inch, from the shadows of ordinary life.
She slinks, traversing generational and cultural abodes,
Stealth is her weapon, a slow toxin permeating the mind.
Gray matter, like dirt, she, a worm, burrowing, eating, defecating.
Every organ in the human temple, becomes desecrated by her reach.
Until muscle, bone, and heart, crumble under her weightiness.

Needing no marble shrine,
They animate the innards of man,
The twin sisters Fear and Anxiety.